The present invention relates to a projection lens system used for transferring circuit or other patterns onto semiconductor wafers through masks, etc.--on which the circuit patterns are drawn--by projection photolithography.
So far, transfer of desired patterns onto integrated circuits such as ICs and LSIs or flat displays built up of liquid crystals has been achieved by non-contact photolithography called the proximity technique or reflecting photolithography called the aligner technique.
Of these, the proximity technique is designed to locate a mask in close proximity to a semiconductor wafer and transfer a circuit pattern drawn on the mask onto the wafer, as set forth in Japanese Provisional Patent Publication No. 50(1975)-115774. In this technique, it is a slight space between the mask and the substrate onto which the pattern is to be transferred that determines transfer resolving power; this space must be very narrow when transfer is to be carried out with high resolving power. However, when the mask is located in too close proximity to or in contact with the substrate, the circuit pattern transferred onto the substrate would be impaired.
In the aligner technique, on the other hand, pattern resolving powers are determined by imagewise numerical aperture, because masks are adapted to be projected onto wafers through a reflecting optical system, as disclosed in Japanese Provisional Patent Publication No. 63(1988)-184328. However, this technique again offers a problem in that no high resolving power can be obtained, because it is impossible to increase the imagewise numerical aperture for the reason that the reflecting optical system is usually an equimultiple one. As the region to be exposed to light, i.e., the image surface increases in area, there is an increase in the expansion of a semiconductor substrate due to the heat of projected light; transfer must be carried out after the alignment of the circuit pattern size by fine adjustment of projecting magnification. However, a major problem with the aligner technique is that a pattern of large size cannot be projected at one time, because it is in principle difficult to vary the projecting magnification in alignment with the expansion of the substrate. In order to solve these problems, the step-and-repeat photolithographic technique with demagnification has been mainly used in recent years. As set forth in Japanese Provisional Patent Publication No. 60( 1985)-195509 and other literature, this technique is designed to project masks onto wafers with suitable demagnification (on the scale of ca. 1 to 2, 3, . . . ) for pattern transfer. This technique enables projecting magnifications to be arbitrarily varied by fine adjustment of a distance between the mask on which a circuit pattern is drawn and the projected image (substrate) and makes it easy to enhance resolving powers by affording a large value for the imagewise numerical aperture of a projection lens, and so will be increasingly used from now on.
However, conventional projection lens systems available with this technique have been found to fall to satisfy both high resolving power (i.e., large numerical aperture) and wide exposure coverages (image heights).